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Two and a half days ago, at around 6:15am local time on December 28, AirAsia flight 8501 (QZ8501) disappeared en route from Indonesia to Singapore. There were 162 passengers and crew on-board, and no survivors have yet been found at the plane’s crash site in the Java Sea. Despite being tracked by radar, and disappearing quite close to land, it still took search and rescue teams more than two days to find debris from the plane. In the wake of Malaysia Airlines flight 370, which still hasn’t been found — and Air France flight 447, which took years to fully recover — why are airlines still hesitating to add real-time tracking to their planes? It is utterly crazy that, in 2014, we can lose vehicles that are responsible shuttling millions of passengers across the skies every day.

AirAsia flight 8501 took off from Juanda International Airport in Indonesia at 5:35am local time (western Indonesian time, UTC+7). At 6:12am, the pilots asked air traffic control (ATC) for clearance to climb to 38,000 feet to avoid a storm. ATC denied the request because of nearby traffic, instead calling for a diversion to the left. Five minutes later, 6:17am, radar contact was lost — and a minute later, 6:18am, the plane’s ADS-B transponder signal was lost. We don’t know exactly what happened yet (neither of the flight data recorders have been recovered), but the most likely scenario is that the plane hit the storm, which caused some kind of catastrophic failure. The pilots did not send a distress signal, which suggests that it all happened very quickly.

The flight path of flight QZ8501, and search and rescue areas [Image credit: New York Times]

A large-scale search-and-rescue effort was launched soon after the plane’s disappearance on December 28, and early this morning — about two and a half days after the plane vanished — an Indonesian official reported that they had recovered 40 bodies from the Karimata Strait off the coast of Borneo, near to the last known location of flight 8501. AirAsia has confirmed that the debris is from flight 8501, too. Given the weather conditions at the time, and how rapidly the plane disappeared, there are not expected to be any survivors.

The only good news is that the debris of the plane appears to be located in shallow waters (about 25 meters or 80 feet), and so it shouldn’t be too difficult to locate the flight data recorder (FDR) and cockpit voice recorder (CVR) — aka, the black boxes. Most of the bodies will probably be recovered, too, unlike the disappearances of MH370 (no bodies found) and AF447 (50 out of 228).

Debris from AirAsia QZ8501, an Airbus A320-216

How do you lose a plane?

But again, at this point we must return to the topic that we originally discussed when flight MH370 disappeared in March: How can it be possible to lose a plane? How can it take two days to locate flight QZ8501? Would there have been more survivors if search-and-rescue had been on the scene within an hour? Why don’t we have real-time tracking of all aircraft, rather than relying on periodic pings of radar or ADS-B? Heck, while we’re at it, why don’t we also have a real-time video and audio feed from the cockpit of all large aircraft?

Satellite imagery, from when QZ8501 lost contact. The plane was just about to fly into some rough conditions.

The obvious answer, as far as the airlines are concerned, is cost. It’s not particularly hard to provide real-time telemetry or a low-bitrate audio feed — we certainly have the technology for it — but it would require expensive new hardware, and there would probably be additional bandwidth charges, too (from satellite companies like Inmarsat). The problem, as with any industry that is faced with spending money to improve security or safety, is that most big companies have a tombstone (or postcautionary) mentality — yes, airlines could outfit airplanes with fancy hardware, but why bother unless you’re forced to by public sentiment or federal regulations? Likewise, Sony could have encrypted its data or the passwords of its users and employees, but until the company got hacked it would’ve seemed like a pointless expense.

For what it’s worth, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) is looking to mandate real-time tracking on large passenger jets — but, as with any bureaucratically laden international organization, we probably shouldn’t expect an actual ruling for months, and then I’m sure airlines will have a number of years to implement the new measures.

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I guess keeping us safe is too expensive for these people. I recently read a figure for the cost of outfitting a wide body passenger jet with a non-stop feed would be in the neighborhood of $100,000 per plane- and while I have not seen a breakdown of this cost, it seems rather excessive to me, at a glance. All of the last mile infrastructure exists, so it’s not as if they would have to build the global network from scratch, after all. It seems to me that any airline that cares could develop a much cheaper system in-house- or better yet, with a company that the world’s airlines both found and fund as a group… there simply has to be a way to reduce this cost significantly.

Marco

While I haven’t seen a breakdown, that number doesn’t really surprise me. It might even be low. It’s not just the hardware on the aircraft (which is not as straightforward as many of us would like to think), but it is also the extra satellites that would need to be positioned in geosynch to carry constant audio and video feeds. The lifetime maintenence and replacement cost of all the hardware (space and plane-based), and the added weight to the aircraft over its life (a much bigger cost than most of us realize). So yes, it is costly. And we say, why won’t the airlines pay it? Well, the problem is that we, the flying public, probably aren’t going to pay it. In a highly competitive industry where there is no real differentiator other than price, and where all searches on travel websites sort by default on price, do you really expect anyone to say, “Hey, Airline X has global tracking, so I’ll scroll past all the cheaper fares to the one that is $10 more, and buy that.” Almost nobody would know to, and it has been shown that virtually nobody would care.

The reason airlines wait for things to be mandated is because he who moves first will simply lose money to the other airlines, so mandates (whether by the public or governing bodies) forces a level playing field where all have to provide that.

That said, this aircraft wasn’t “lost” in the same way as MH370 as so many outlets started calling it 5 minutes after it disappeared. It is simply a big ocean, even if you have the last position of the aircraft. The available radar data more or less showed where the plane went down. The reason it took 2.5 days to get an exact fix was more about the horrible weather on scene than anything else. I’d bet it would still have taken at least a day or two even with an on-board GPS system that functioned until the aircraft hit the water.

I’m flying 12,000 miles in a few months with the 5 people who mean the most to me in the world, and I can tell you that for me having a GPS system on a plane would make no difference to me in my feeling of safety, nor would I choose to spend any extra money to have it on my aircraft. A thousand things could go wrong with an aircraft, and having data from the plane wouldn’t ever help me or save me, and is extremely unlikely ever to be needed by anyone even if the aircraft were lost.

In the end we are all fixated on these air disasters because we see a few hundred people killed at the same time in the same place. But last year we lost 1.2 million people to auto accidents in the world. Where’s the outrage? The demand for tech that would safe at least a few hundred thousand of them? Why aren’t we forcing auto companies to pour billions into self-driving systems and mandating them on all cars? We have over 3 billion passengers flying a year on large airliners, and on average over the last 40 years we’ve lost about 415 a year due to accidents. A GPS system isn’t going to change that number. But the same amount of resources can be put into many other places that can and do save many lives.

The response should be proportional to the problem. Flying is extremely safe, safer than just about any other method of travel. It is always amazing to me when rational-minded, scientifically inclined people (myself included) have a knee-jerk reaction to an emotional stimulus hyped up by the media. A GPS system on aircraft is unlikely to ever actually save anyone, but would be a massive cost that would ultimately be born by consumers and happily collected by a slew of new corporations who would be created. Not that I’m anti-corporation, but I don’t like when ineffective regulations create them and effectively funnel money to them.

Jeff Vahrenkamp

The difference between self driving cars and gps uplinks for planes is that the gps technology is readily available and not terribly expensive. The geosynchronous SATs are already in orbit over the worlds oceans, and a sat phone which is how large the transponder would need to be adds ounces of weight.

It would only need to be used by thosebplanes whose paths were over large streaches of ocean. And while you may not feel like it would improve safety, if the plane went down in a controlled manner, the difference between searching 10000-1000000 sq miles and 100, means the difference between life and death, as well as finding out what caused the crash.

Marco

I disagree. They’re not talking about just a GPS ping, or a relatively simple transponder. But rather streaming lots of data, audio, and even video from every plane in the sky. It would need to do so in a tough and very cold environment with lots of vibration, while moving at high speeds and making turns. It would have to be able to cut through all storms and weather. It would need a redundant system, and FAA approval. It needs to continue to operate even if main power is lost during descent for it to be useful. It is nowhere near the simple feat that you claim it to be.

What would define a “large stretch of ocean” for you? Does AirAsia 8501 flight qualify? It is was never more than 100 miles from any major land mass, after all. How about any airliner that goes over (or might ever go over) any ocean or large lake? Now you’re pretty much having to equip them all.

The scenario you play out here is basically a non-event. There have only been 4 airliner ditchings in all of commercial aviation history (anything short of a ditching is not survivable). Two of those were in rivers. Another was just off a beach. And the last was 30 miles offshore in a location known to the authorities as it happened. In order to actually save lives, this system would have to be involved in an actual ditching incident, one where the pilots could not communicate by radio, where the transponder was off, and where radar could not see the aircraft. I’m not going to guess at the probabilities of that happening, because they’d be insanely small. It just isn’t going to save lives.

And yes, self-driving cars are as much a reality today as the systems for real-time tracking and data transfer are today. If every car suddenly got the current brains and hardware from the Google self-driving fleet cars and took over most driving (handing back to the human for the small fractions of time when it couldn’t confidently handle the situation), we’d likely instantly start saving 30,000 lives a year in the US alone.

And there are many low-tech ways to spend that much money to save more people. This week we lost 162 (mostly) Indonesians on the AirAsia flight. How much money would it take every year to save that many poor Indonesian kids from starving to death or dying from diseases related to malnutrition? Not much.

So (in my opinion) let’s not waste our resources on something that is unlikely to ever help anyone, and instead use them where they WILL do some good.

But if you think that putting these trackers on planes is simple and cheap and will save lives, then you should do it. After all, you’d make a fortune while saving lives if you’re right.

ronch

$100K is a tiny fraction of the cost of an airplane. Far from being even half a percent for this sort of aircraft. Check Wikipedia for pricing.

There’s a lot about airlines’ planes that are still archaic. Hell, while flying into houston the other day, they had to divert the plane I was on quickly because the ATC called us in on top of another plane. I thought it was interesting that with all of the radars and beacons that they use in an airport, the final word in how and where we land comes down to the decision of a man who almost had us land on top of another plane.

Joshua Burstyn

Agreed, although in fairness some have tried to bring air traffic controls into the computing age only to find the little white plastic sticks still work best. (I’m no expert, by the way. Just going by Air Crash investigations and other programs’ advice.)

Happy holidays.

ronch

Sure, the mechanism necessary to track aircraft is important, but coming up with operating procedures that prevent these kinds of mishaps is more — far more — important. As they say, there’s no point in crying over spilt milk. I mean, sure, people will cry over a missing jet but you guys do get the idea, right?

Hans Pedersen

They do have tracking, don’t they? Transponders they’re not allowed to turn off. There is just a problem here; if a plane has a terminal disaster in mid air, at 10+ km’s height and 1000’s of kilometres from land, it’s not easy to go there and find where it eventually ended up crashing as boats doesn’t really travel very fast on water. Remember, the tracking will fail long before the plane hits the water. And when you get out in the suspected crash area, you can’t see object laying in the water from very big distances either, and there’s of course also a lot of garbage floating around out there already.

The thing happening with MH370 earlier this year is an extreme exception to the rule (or possibly a cover up by the US navy for shooting it down as they felt it was a threat, if you’re into conspiracy theories). Point is, planes doesn’t usually disappear when they crash. It’s just takes time to get there to find and retrieve debris on a vast ocean, several kilometres deep.

lj0000

really could not understand the plane makers – many modern planes are already fitted with wifi. (even in air asia flights) why not use them for tracking as well?

Russ

I can track my position in a van in real time on my phone but they can’t keep track of a plane?
Seriously?
Something is REALLY screwed up here.

Darren Reid

You can track position in the van easily, so to you can in the plane relatively easily. The tricky bit is getting that information to someone else. We have only in the last decade been able to access internet on our phones, and when you think about it, its fairly poor. It’s patchy in the middle of major cities. Now try getting a signal 30,000ft in the air over millions of square miles. Good luck with that, your van is in a tiny area in comparison.

It should be pointed out that you are probably talking about spending $100m to $1 billion dollars plus operating costs to retrofit all the current passenger planes.

Now, how many lives does that save? I’m guessing zero.

Quite frankly, if I’m going to pay for extra safety measures (and yes, the passengers will pay), I’d prefer to pay for measures that actually are likely to have some effect. And, of course, there’s no telling how many lives that $100-1000m would actually save when left in the hands of consumers.

People like to pretend that the money mysteriously comes from nowhere. But of course the reality is that *we* pay for every penny of it. And that’s money we *don’t* have to spend on things that will likely make us a happier and safer.

Opportunity cost. If you don’t understand the concept, then you cannot make rational decisions about safety.

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